Something strange is happening at the Google datacentres. The Google search seems to be returning some strange results on some of my targeted keywords. This usually indicates that a Pagerank (PR) update is in process.

I’ve just checked the Pagerank for my sites and can confirm that this blog (www.daveso.com) has reached PR3, Yipee!! But what exactly is Pagerank?

An Explaination of Pagerank

The Pagerank of a website is greater the more incoming links the site has, it is a measure of a websites link popularity. Sites rank from 0 to 10 for Pagerank. New sites are ranked 0 whereas very popular sites (Google.com) can rank as high as 10. The number given is a measure of a websites popularity.

In a nutshell, google considers each link to be a vote for that site, the more links a site has the more popular it must be. Links from more popular sites are considered as more important than others. Google uses Pagerank along with other factors to determine where to place a website in its search results.

What wikipedia says:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[1]) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools.[2]

The name PageRank is a trademark of Google. The PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999 ). The patent is not assigned to Google but to Stanford University.

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So there you go. I’ll soon write a post on how to check your websites Pagerank. At the moment whilst the update is happening a lot of the tools available to check PR seem to be down.